Predicting expert moves in the game of Othello using fully convolutional neural networks

Abstract:   Careful feature engineering is an important factor of artificial intelligence for games. In this thesis I investigate the benefit of delegating the engineering efforts to the model rather than the features, using the board game Othello as a case study. Convolutional neural networks of varying depths are trained to play in a human-like manner by learning to predict actions from tournaments. My main result is that using a raw board state representation, a network can be trained to achieve 57.4% prediction accuracy on a test set, surpassing previous state-of-the-art in this task.  The accuracy is increased to 58.3% by adding several common handcrafted features as input to the network but at the cost of more than half again as much the computation time.